WillSpirit

After perusing a variety of texts about spiritual growth, I better understand the universality of my recent stirring mind states. This perspective helps, because it is easy to get carried away after numinous experiences. Hopefully, visitors will forgive my naïve enthusiasm and beginner’s ignorance.

It is no secret that profound experiences have blessed many people around the world and throughout human history. Those committed to spiritual paths devote their lives to seeking and exploring such epiphanies, and no doubt enjoy far greater understanding, equanimity, and wisdom than I ever will. My purpose here is only to describe my particular journey, and perhaps offer hope to others burdened with chronic depression. The most important fact of my ‘breakthrough’ is that it has swept away most of my misery. Even when I stumble and feel defeated for a few days, the memory of a better place remains, and the ease with which I exit the darkness astounds me. Six months ago my plan was to learn how to live a full life in spite of depression. That I would ever be completely free of it, even temporarily, seemed impossible. Before, in my best frames of mind, there remained patches of depression that threatened me with shade, like scattered clouds on an otherwise sunny day. Now I spend the majority of my time feeling light and balanced, with no ominous darkness on the horizon. And when depression does descend it doesn’t linger, it leaves behind no shadow, and while it lasts I appreciate its solemn beauty (most of the time, at least).

The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James, is familiar to many western seekers of spiritual growth. The book describes the vast range of spiritual frames of mind, and the large variety of ways we reach them. Sometimes a person achieves transcendence after years of meditation, study, and intention. Spiritual awareness accumulates gradually as the result of such effort, with progress punctuated by moments of sudden growth. But a life of seeking is not required. Not infrequently, a person ‘awakens’ in the aftermath of catastrophic stress or after collapse into utter despair. Crisis and failure offer us the opportunity to give up the fight and drop all barriers. The reward can be a flood of clarity, acceptance, and universal love.

If I were to classify my current situation, it would fall between those extremes. Although I have certainly not devoted my life to a quest for meaning, I nonetheless have been studying and searching. And despite a decade of bad luck, nothing in the past year has been particularly awful, nor did my ego disintegrate in an acute moment of hopelessness.

The nature of my recent spiritual experiences also lies between extremes. Ten years ago a series of ‘visions’ transported me into a mood of wide-eyed ecstasy, a kaleidoscope of marvelous sensory experiences, and a conviction that I had seen and spoken with God. A more magnificent and soul-quaking episode would be hard to imagine. However, much of the mental content was unbalanced, irrational, or poorly grounded. Although the clarity and salience of recent weeks equaled those of the earlier episode, they were not accompanied by ecstasy or hallucinations. As I’ve discussed, strictly supernatural beliefs played no role. Instead, what I know to be true about how the world is structured and how my life has unfolded took on a new light. Every particle of my mind understood that the universe is both dispassionately random, and lovingly numinous. This sounds paradoxical when stated in words, but from a state of exquisite nonverbal awareness, it made perfect sense. This solidly sane sacred experience felt just as profound as the arguably insane ‘religious visions’ of a decade earlier. But it was a little less intense, and was free of ‘delusional’ and ‘hallucinatory’ content.

Looking at the other end of the spectrum, I’ve explored mindfulness meditation for some years, and the recent ‘awakenings’ felt akin to the state of wordless peace that comes with such practice. The way I felt intensely ‘alive’, for instance, mirrored the way mindfulness brings one in touch with one’s body and sensory surroundings without the intervening filter of the verbal mind. In fact, three days ago it was a combination of meditation and acupuncture that returned me (for a whole afternoon) to the frame of resonant clarity that began with my spiritual retreat in January, and which is becoming more and more familiar. But the psychic impact of my recent moments of understanding exceeded that of even the deepest meditative states I’d previously achieved.

Experienced practitioners probably read my descriptions with a bit of amusement. I must sound like an adolescent who has just discovered sensual romantic love, and thinks he or she has stumbled on something personal and exceptional, when in fact it is universal and expected. But even if everyone else already knows about such love, it’s new to the teenaged romantic, and soul-penetrating clarity is new to me. So I hope those further along this path will indulge my childlike wonder.

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